Perry Mason returns to TV the golden age of mystery

We’re grateful for the return of famous lawyer Perry Mason and his world of swaggering corrupt cops, wonderful cars and whiskey by the gallon

Matthew Rhys in season 2 of Perry Mason, on Binge

The long-awaited second season of Perry Mason has just arrived after two and a half years and what pleasure it offers, following directly on from the first season and set in a wonderfully realised Los Angeles noir. The City of Angels is a white-dominated town, where the wealthy and the sinister, extortionists and strongarm men, are exploiting the crap out of working class sad sacks thronging the city’s soup kitchens and people of colour hanging on to their dignity.

It’s around 1933 and the Depression creates bitter disputes between labour and employers. The political response is often chaotic and confusing and social messiahs, like one at the centre of the new story, offer appealing fantasies of reprieve and recovery. Capitalism casts a sinister shadow over the fabled development of the city, which is living up to its reputation as the “wickedest town in California”.

The series was originally created by Ron Fitzgerald and Rolin Jones, who steered the series during its initial HBO run before moving onto other projects. And terrific their season was, with Matthew Rhys as a Mason straight out of the pulps where he originated in the novels of Earl Stanley Gardner, proving some wonderful noirish entertainment in a taut, tangled and sinuous production.

Fitzgerald and Jones also abandoned the case-of-the-week, “court and confessions” format of the original TV series, starring the urbane Raymond Burr as Mason, in favour of one season-long mystery.

The truculent lawyer, though rarely seen without sporting that spiffy Fedora, was no longer confined to a court in front of a judge but let loose in the city Gardner’s contemporary Raymond Chandler said was “dark and full of blood”. It was a place fascinated by the fast, ruthless growth of Italian and Irish mobs and the heavy press given to motiveless killings by local newspapers revelling in the explicit.

Chandler began to hate LA and the mass-produced values emerging around the city; a corporation-sponsored “culture of the filtered cigarette”, leading he reckoned, to a “steakless steak to be broiled on a heartless broiler in a non-existent oven and eaten by a toothless ghost”. Perry Mason feels much the same way in this compelling series.

The new writers and showrunners Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, creators of the Steven Soderbergh-directed period piece The Knick, maintain the look and feel of the series as if no changes have taken place. Again one case dominates the season but it is less graphically violent. There’s no sex – so far – but the story is edgy enough to satisfy any lover of hard-boiled fiction. Their mandate Begler says, “Was to do it and do it better. We felt we could expand the size of the story and what you see of Los Angeles.”

The Knick was a startling, darkly comic but brutally realistic series set in downtown New York in 1900. It was centred on the once respectable Knickerbocker Hospital and the surgeons, nurses and staff who pushed the boundaries of medicine in a time of astonishingly high mortality rates. It was a work of an undeniably coherent vision with a stylish pictorial vernacular that was both clever and arresting.

And Amiel and Berger have done something similar here, even if it’s a little slow to start. The pair wrote the first episode and have a nice control over the movement of their story. As did Gardner, who also was capable of descriptive action/adventure writing at its most graphic. Their goal they say was to focus on the notion of justice and how it looks different for different people. “What does justice look like for the people with the means and the power versus those who have nothing?”

And under the clever visual eye of Mexican director Fernando Coimbra, a veteran of the brilliant Netflix series Narcos — the drug cartel drama full of action movie fireworks, set-piece escapes and gunfights — they highlight Mason’s role as a rather battered beacon of morality. Mason is a man with a personal sense of honour and feeling of obligation to his role; he is never content to be a mere survivor and is inexorably drawn into the quest for justice. In multiple scenes we see him flying along LA’s night-time roads, in his black goggles, like some sort of avenging angel. Until, of course, he crashes.

Early in the season’s first episode he’s given a theory by assistant district attorney, Hamilton Burger (Justin Kirk), that there is no such thing as real justice – there is only an illusion. It’s a thought that preys on Mason and makes him uncomfortable; he is uncertain whether a clear conception of the social virtue of legal righteousness is possible in LA.

The series is derived from Gardner’s many pulpish novels and the new season is loosely based on The Case of the Velvet Claws, a novel that echoes an earlier Black Mask story featuring a young fighting New York attorney called Ken Corning. But Corning’s career was soon finished, the tireless writer creating in Perry Mason the most famous criminal defense attorney in literature, when he published The Case of the Velvet Claws on March 1, 1933.

He went on to produce 80 Mason novels, which, in all editions, sold more than 315 million copies. The young lawyer, originally called Stark, then Keene, followed more than three dozen stories written for the so-called pulp magazines like Black Mask, Detective Fiction Weekly, Argosy, and Breezy Stories.

Pulp these days is really a generic term frequently misused to indicate the work of hacks, the term derived from the word pulpwood, the very cheap paper used to produce popular magazines after World War 1. Their covers were largely bright red and yellow, as writer Loren D. Estleman suggested, “Like ketchup and mustard container in a railcar diner”, walking the tightrope between tasteless and trial-by-jury. Some of these publications were so pornographic they practically invited postal inspectors to seize them at the loading docks.

The series gives us Mason as the tough guy of Gardner’s early novels, steeped in the Black Mask tradition, carrying on the writer’s declaration that “smash bang action” was the basis for his exploits. His irregularities are many and various, a constant source of embarrassment for his assistant and de facto co-counsel Della Street, played again by the svelte Juliet Rylance, with a gleeful wit still in place on her painted lips. Mason constantly places himself in jeopardy of disbarment or even criminal prosecution.

The first episode, Chapter Nine, starts with a spectacular fire aboard a luxury speak-easy casino barge, an ill-advised act of arson engineered by, as it turns out quite quickly, Brooks McCutcheon (Tommy Dewey), pampered scion of the ruthless magnate, the immaculate Lydell (Paul Raci). Brooks is obsessed with the idea of importing a baseball team to LA. “We’re going to be where everyone wants to be,” he says of his home town. “You think anyone thinks of moving to Cincinnati?”

(The fire sequence is a brilliant piece of filmmaking. In a seemingly continuous handheld shot, Coimbra transforms a scene of almost barbarous licentiousness into a mood of frenzied fear, and creates an almost delirious energy.)

Mason still carrying emotional scars from the case that dominated the first season, the kidnapping of a child, is now doing civil law. His most recent gig is representing the grocery store impresario Sunny Gryce (Sean Astin) against a former employee (Matt Bush) who invented many of Sunny’s successful sales techniques and then used them to start his own store. Mason hates his new role; running people out of business is not his way.

He reckons he’s no longer a lawyer but “a vulture sucking the last scraps from his legal victim’s bones.” Della is also a little at sea with her own “exceptionally dull” life with her girlfriend and easily entertains the possibility of a date with a woman she encounters in the powder room at an up-market restaurant at a meeting with a possible client.

And Mason’s investigator Paul Drake, an ex-cop turned private investigator, is played with wonderful stoicism by Chris Chalk. Somewhat adrift and missing the regular source of income from his former boss’s new firm, Drake is inveigled into some surveillance work that might have dire results.

The episode, sometimes ambling a little like Mason after he crashes his bike, unfolds as the lawyer’s relationship with his hard-boiled code, resting as it does on a personal sense of rightness and honour, becomes more ambiguous as he broods. The family farm, which once provided solace to the former soldier with its old dairy, has been sold to the enterprising pilot Lupe, played by the somewhat astonishing Veronica Falcon.

There are also swaggering corrupt cops, gay women on the make, some wonderful cars, whiskey by the gallon, vicious capitalists determined to break their competitors whatever it takes, children in creepy masks, a wild and crooked Los Angeles lusciously filed by cinematographer Eliot Rockett, and an evocative jazzy soundtrack by Terence Blanchard. And not to mention a mysterious guy who keeps popping up fingering a coin with a mysterious insignia, some kind of star and crescent. And of course there is a brutal murder, the victim of which has been found shot through the eye in a gorgeous yellow convertible, which comes Mason’s way.

Welcome back Perry, you are still an entertaining reminder of D. H. Lawrence’s argument in Studies in Classic American Literature, that the true American soul is not the resolute pioneer but a bitter, disaffected hunter, “Hard, stoic, isolate, and a killer.”

Perry Mason streaming on Foxtel and Binge.